My final Jay-Z selection comes from the 1998 album Hard Knock Life, his third.
I know a little bit about the title track from the descriptions of it I read in compiling this list. Specifically, it samples the chorus of the song of the same name from the Broadway show Annie. That’s a hell of a bold move for a rap song, so I’m definitely intrigued.
Today’s Jay-Z track is another cut from 2001’s The Blueprint, which brought us yesterday’s team-up with Eminem.
‘Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)’ is one of the four tracks on this album produced by a then little-known Kanye West, and I’m very curious to hear it for that reason.
Today’s Jay-Z track features a guest appearance by Eminem, a rapper whose work I know quite well. This track originally appeared on Jay’Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint, and later on a reissue of Eminem’s first greatest hits collection, Curtain Call.
2001 was a year after the release of The Marshall Mathers LP and just about the height of Eminem’s popularity, not to mention the controversy surrounding him.
Yesterday’s Jay-Z track, ’99 Problems,’ was from 2003’s The Black Album, a record that the rapper claimed at the time would be his last (didn’t quite turn out that way).
Today’s track is from Jay-Z’s first album, Reasonable Doubt, released seven years earlier in the summer of ’96. The song features Notorious B.I.G., another total mystery to me, so this should give me a chance to check them both out.
I feel like I have an adequate working knowledge of most artists considered among the greats. I own or have owned albums even by performers I don’t care for, such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
But it occurred to me recently that I have absolutely no familiarity with the man many critics and fans consider the greatest rapper of all-time — Jay-Z.
Meet Me In Montauk 